Travel day and my first impression of my new town

My travel day was pretty uneventful. Per my usual habit, I couldn’t sleep on the plane which meant I arrived in Augsburg having been awake a full 24 hours…with things still left to do.

The drive from the airport was fun, seeing all the sites in the distance, but also realizing that major stretches of the road look just like Minnesota in the summer (construction + corn fields).

Arriving at the school was wonderful. Like most of the schools I’ve ever taught in, it was chaos with furniture everywhere, painting being done, construction finishing up. Cathie, the principal of the school was thoroughly apologetic about the look of things, but I assured her I wouldn’t have expected anything else.

Augsburg itself is what is called a “little, big city.” The buildings are all fairly tiny and squished together, but the population is 250,000. It has big city problems such as graffiti, but still feels like a small town with lots of little neighborhoods and local shops.

My apartment is in a quiet neighborhood. Unfortunately, Google Earth led me wrong and my building is actually part of a complex of apartment buildings. But I have a great wrap-around patio that looks into a courtyard. People sit out on their patios often and it seems like it’s a family oriented complex. Oh, and I have an indoor pool! Definitely excited about that.

The apartment itself is bigger than I anticipated. It’s a studio, but it has a separate kitchen, bathroom and hallway where the closet/dressers are. It’s fairly spacious in that I have two couches, a bed, a table with two chairs, a desk and a large coffee table in one room and it doesn’t feel crowded.

Not only did Evan(the previous tenant and former ISA teacher) leave a ton of stuff, Bec (another teacher who moved) left me several boxes of things. And the Mecca of all things amazing and inexpensive, IKEA is in town!

Well, I’m off to bed (much needed after being up for over 24 hours) so hopefully I can post this tomorrow!